


A cage without a key

by cicak



Series: Episode fics for Hannibal S2 [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cage Dancing, Cages, Dirty Dancing, M/M, Surprisingly not a crack au, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, mild 2x02 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-09
Updated: 2014-03-09
Packaged: 2018-01-15 04:37:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1291615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their therapy inside the cage is like a dance. Sometimes Will feel’s he’s dancing for twenties and Hannibal is the only one who's going to make it rain.</p>
<p>Will has a purposefully extravagant fantasy life inside the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A cage without a key

There’s nothing to do in the cell but think and remember, and try not to get the two confused.

False memories are a problem. Lies told to yourself become truths if repeated enough, until the actual reality of what someone said, or how they behaved or who hit who first becomes lost to the seas of time and other people’s dim recollections, themselves made insecure by your security in your fact.

The problem is one of imagination, when imagination is like a puppy that wants to play with all the other memories. You have to give the puppy exercise, so it doesn’t get distracted from the main prize. 

And so Will Graham exercises his imagination by picturing scenarios that could never have happened.

He focuses on the cages. They are a perfect framing device for his ridicule - they insist on putting him in cages of decreasing size and he takes them in his mind and makes them pitiful and hilarious, a private joke between him and the puppy. 

In the first cage he is a prized parrot in an aviary. First an African Grey, an intelligent and loved bird, needy for attention, petting and treats, that couldn’t speak anything but what he’s taught. At first that was liberating, just to be a bird in grey plumage in a grey world that people looked at and cooed over. The bird has a secret, and however insightful his comments were, everyone knew they were nothing but a meaningless party trick. Then, when he realised just how maudlin that was, he imagined himself a cockatoo with a sulphur crest that he could raise and warn those who were in danger from his owner. Hannibal being his owner, and Will the silent witness in the body of a bird.  
Once Hannibal entered the fantasy, his voice echoing ‘who’s a pretty boy then’ with cool curiosity and a handful of seeds that are nothing but bones and ash, Will retires the birdcage and finds something new.

The second cage is the bear trap. Bored and hungry and trapped in the woods, his bear self roars at his captors, even though they are far away and unable to hear him. When the captor arrives, it is Hannibal, who uses the trapped bear to hide his victims’ remains; a natural garbage disposal. He is kept alive, a secret and a tool, held between death and life and hearing the birds sing outside. He can never get close enough to maul Hannibal when he comes to bring his offering, and so the bear trap doesn’t last long. 

The third cage is the one that is most ludicrous. He never went to one of the bars with the dancing girls in cages, even during Mardi Gras or for a misguided bachelor party. He’s seen them on TV though, in the curiously underfilled nightclub scenes of trashy late night dramas, where a girl wearing not very much dances in a cage to an indifferent audience of people advancing a plot. The first time he gets into a therapy cage he feels like a go go dancer waiting for her turn in the spotlight.

The fantasy is fun. Chilton represents the odious John who waves paltry sums in his face, a handful of sweaty dollar bills that he’s supposed to want to perform for. The relentlessly unending generic beat his imagination pipes through the scene is just enough to dance to with an indifference, a quirk of a hip and a shimmy of a shoulder to be a facsimile of dance. His inner self smiles, shakes his head, and turns away from the small offering. It amuses him to imagine Chilton being cockblocked, where his money is as useless as his attempts at psychoanalysis. 

He imagines the nurses, the orderlies, the cleaner, the other patients he sees in brief glimpses, and even his former coworkers at BDU as punters he either dances for or refuses with a coy wink and a smile. It remains a private joke, a little bit of sauce in a dry world.

Hannibal creeps into the fantasy in his darkest hours, when he is exhausted and demoralised and the puppy is fractious and clawing at itself in the shadows. He sees him out of the corner of his eye, sometimes watching another dancer, or obviously watching the opposite wall, facing away from the dancers altogether. Hannibal taunts him by not giving him his singular attention, not looking at his increasingly lewd dancing no matter how much Will shames himself trying to get his attention. Only once he’s exhausted, barely able to move, does Hannibal finally appear in the chair opposite his cage, facing the right way.

Will comes, terrified, not realising his hand was even on his cock, to the thought of Hannibal meeting his eyes, taking out his thin, tanned leather wallet (that he knows even in his fantasy isn’t made of cow) and revealing a thick ream of twenty dollar bills.

Once Hannibal infests a fantasy there’s no getting rid of him. He is embedded in the deepest parts of his brain, seemingly wandering effortlessly into anywhere Will wants to have privacy. Will moves on, but in the depths of the night he cannot stop dancing for Hannibal’s approval, dancing to get a rise out of him. Hannibal never gets out of his seat, never actually gives him any of his money, just hints at the promise of making it rain and putting Will out of his misery. Will dances in his mind on whirling repeat, in less and less clothing and in more and more shameful ways.

The night after he ‘breaks down’ in front of Hannibal and Alana they creep into his 3AM fantasies and put on a show of their own. Alana sits and has the money, drinking champagne from the bottle and leering at him as she sucks on Hannibal’s tongue. 

It breaks for him that week, the ridiculousness of the fantasy coming to a head after his visit from Prurnell. Hannibal is on stage with him now, outside the cage but pressed up against the bars. He grabs for Will, tries to catch his hands and stop him from dancing, to slow him down to work out what he’s doing. He manages to pin Will to the bars and bites his mouth which splits like a peach. Hannibal kisses him forcefully until he gives into it, lets himself work through it and perversely enjoy the relief of not having to dance. He hears a faint rustle and feels the $20 bills stick to the oil on his skin, feels them flap in the wind like feathers. Feels Hannibal’s broad hands moving him into a position that presents him to the crowd, now loud and raucous. In his fantasy he manages to grab at the opposite wall of the cage and feels every inch of Hannibal’s cock force its way into him. He feels Hannibal fucking him through the bars, and however awful the reality, however much he knows what this represents, he allows himself to give in, to realise that there’s two sides to a dirty cage fuck in front of a thousand people. That the real him is hidden, and everyone is now looking at Hannibal Lecter’s vulnerabilities. He allows himself to come, to let out the breath he hadn’t even known he was holding.

 

The final cage is a cock cage that someone, in his mind, calmly buckles him in to. He refuses to picture the face of that person, just imagines their cool hands on his hot mental flesh, locking him away and giving him back his control, taking away his libido and allowing him to focus on the task at hand.  
His fantasies return to cool running water, gambolling dogs and ominous stags. He never visits the cage fantasy again.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously inspired by Hettienne Park's tweet about Will dancing in the psychotherapy cage.  
> I explicitly didn't want to write a crack AU, but also didn't want to write anything too dark. Hopefully this manages to walk that line. Its still cracky though.  
> I'm writing a fic for each episode of the second season. You can follow my descent into madness at [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com). Come say hi!


End file.
